Unconfirmed reports say that Android 5 "Jelly Bean" could be released this fall, featuring such improvements as Chrome browser integration, better enterprise security, better power management, and maybe dual-booting support for Microsoft's Windows 8.

Mozilla Marketplace, which is Mozilla's entrant in the online application store arena, is set to move to a public beta stage in a few weeks, a company official said on Tuesday.

Sencha describes Sencha Architect 2, the latest incarnation of its visual Web development tool, as "a massive upgrade to Ext Designer," the previous version. The name change from Designer to Architect reflects the product's new focus. Instead of a tool for building Web UIs, Sencha says the new version is suitable for creating complete Web applications, both for UI designers and back-end developers. That's true up to a point.

For the third year in a row, mobile open source software projects have more than doubled in number, with the current count at around 18,000, up from around 8,000 in 2010.

With an eye on the evolving BYOD and

Xamarin, with an upgrade to its Mono for Android SDK on Monday, is adding a drag-and-drop, graphical designer for building Android application interfaces within either Microsoft's Visual Studio or Xamarin's own MonoDevelop IDE.

Despite the gold-rush atmosphere around mobile application development, you won't find many newbie-friendly tools aligned to help nonprogrammers mine for application riches. Even if the target platforms often seem like toys, most of the development kits are still developer-minded and code-centric, and they can present formidable hurdles to the uninitiated.

The C language, which displaced Java as the most popular language in the Tiobe Programming Community monthly assessment in April, has maintained its No. 1 spot in the May report released this week. But a high-profile member of the PHP community is questioning the accuracy of the index itself.

Salesforce.com's Heroku division this week rolled out two entry-level tiers for its Postgres-based cloud database service, hoping to cater to applications with lower data-volume requirements, as well as helping startup developers make an easier jump into production.

The new Crane level of the database service costs $50 per month, with a 400MB RAM cache. Next up from there is the new Kappa tier, which costs $100 per month and has an 800MB cache.

Google's engineers never studied other companies' patents while developing Android for fear of allowing those patents to influence their design decisions, Google's Android chief Andy Rubin testified on the stand Wednesday.

"I believe when you're an engineer you shouldn't study someone else's inventions when you're trying to come up with your own," Rubin testified under rebuttal questioning by one of Google's lawyers.

Open source Java will be brought to the PowerPC architecture for Linux and IBM's AIX OS under a proposal floated this week that could eventually benefit the different Linux distributors.

Google has developed a tool to automate the creation of custom-reporting dashboards for its Analytics website-usage tracking service, the company said on Wednesday.

The new Google Analytics Easy Dashboard Library lets developers create these dashboards without the need for them to learn the ins and outs of the Analytics API and manually write the code.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) now allows ASP.Net developers to take advantage of Elastic Beanstalk, which has been developed to make it easier to roll out cloud-based applications, the company said on Tuesday.

Using the AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio, developers can upload their ASP.Net applications to Amazon's cloud, and Elastic Beanstalk then automatically takes care of deployment details such as capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling and application health monitoring, according to the company.

Google is testing a long-awaited full-text search API (application programming interface) for the Google App Engine, the company said on Tuesday.

The App Engine lets developers build Web applications hosted on Google's infrastructure, and developers have long complained that the current search API is inadequate.

Dell this week revealed Project Sputnik, a six-month-long pilot program to develop an Ubuntu laptop designed specifically for developers and Microsoft revamps UI on Visual Studio IDE upgrade

Microsoft is making changes to the user interface for the planned Visual Studio 11 IDE, which impact coloring, icon usability, and application of the Metro look and feel.

Headset maker Plantronics this week is kicking off a campaign aimed at enticing developers to build line-of-business applications for the company's devices.

The company on Wednesday will formally launch its developer community at Plantronics Developer Connection. The program provides technical resources and support for "context-aware computing," with developers able to build applications that access and receive events on Plantronics headsets.

Java's direct responsibility in the recent Mac Flashback Trojan attacks have many calling for Java's retirement, including InfoWorld's own Woody Leonhard.

Today, the jury in the case by ruling in favor Oracle against Google over Android's use of Java demonstrated how badly the copyright laws of the 19th and 20th century fit the technology market of the 21st century.

The market for software related to the Hadoop and MapReduce programming frameworks for large-scale data analysis will jump from $77 million in 2011 to $812.8 million in 2016, a compound annual growth rate of 60.2 percent, according to a new report released Monday by analyst firm IDC.